


Avatar Pinkie Pie: Lesson One, Listen to the Earth

by confidenceTrickster



Series: Avatar Pinkie Pie [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Genre: At least hopefully the physical comedy gets across?, Avatar Pinkie Pie, Crossover, Humor, This came to me in a dream so blame the collective unconscious I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 21:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8176360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confidenceTrickster/pseuds/confidenceTrickster
Summary: An Earth Pony. An Earthbender. Together, they fight crime.





	

_ Bounce! _

 

Toph listened incredulously as Pinkie Pie's hooves touched down, barely kissing the Earth, then bounced her up again with a very suspicious springy-ness. 

 

She closed her eyes, calculating the trajectories--surely she had to come down... now! Now? 

 

"Pinkie! Get your hooves on the ground so we can continue the lesson!" 

 

"Oh! Sorry Toph!" Pinkie's voice sounded an awful lot like she was upside-down right in front of Toph, and the blind earthbender couldn't help breathing a sigh of relief as Pinkie followed instructions and became "visible" again, settling down on her haunches to listen. 

 

"Sheesh, Pinkie, my friend Aang has some twinkle toes, but you really take the cake! Although I guess in your case they'd be twinkle hooves, haha!" Toph smirked. An internal view of Pinkie's thought processes would have shown a dangerously rapid oscillation between "Ask about a New Friend!" "Ask about cake!" and "Pretend the other person was making a hilarious joke!". 

 

"Hee hee! Silly, I'M not Twinkle Whooves--and actually" she leaned forward conspiratorially, raising a hoof to whisper, "he doesn't really like being called by his first name anymore, now that he got his Doctorate!" 

 

Toph rolled her eyes--a gesture she'd worked out herself from first principles, and deployed with no small satisfaction. "Sure, sure. But you spend less time on the ground than any Earth Pony I've ever met! You've gotta learn to take your time, Pinkie, and really  _ listen  _ to the Earth!"

 

She stamped a bare foot, and feltheard the ripples of sound from it radiating out, bouncing off and highlighting the (reportedly) pink pony next to her, the rocks and trees around them, and so on as they dwindled off over the mesa. Pinkie perked up as she felt the vibrations running through her hooves, and craaaaned down, her neck stretching a little farther than most ponies would have been comfortable with, to press an ear--and most of her face--flat to the ground. "Oooooo, wow! You learned to use Earthbending for  _ sonar _ _?"_

 

Toph crossed her arms, beaming with pride. "Yep. Just like a--"

 

"A submarine! Right!" Pinkie interjected, her cheek still flat against the dirt. _"_ _ Ping! Ping! Ping! " _

 

Toph decided to let it pass. "Sure, a subwhatever. Anyway, if you want to learn _my_ style of Earthbending, which is to say the BEST style, the first two steps are: stay on the ground, and listen!" Pinkie nodded vigorously, smearing her cheek across the dirt. "You got it, sister! I never really felt like Rock Farm Style was a good fit for me, anyway--speaking of sisters, my sister Maud is way better at it! Oops! Listening ears on!" Pinkie turned her head and pressed her other ear flat against the ground too, so her head was now almost upside-down. 

 

Toph took what she could get. "So. It's all about sending your vibrations out into the Earth, and listening to what they come across." Pinkie's hoof shot up. 

 

"Oooh! Ooh me! So, it's like a Reverse Pinkie Sense?" Toph raised an eyebrow. "Reverse what, now?" The Avatar rubbed her front hooves together gleefully. 

 

"Pinkie Sense! It's one of my little tricks. My family always thought it was an Avatar Thing, but it doesn't  _ feel  _ like my connection to the Spirit World... it's... less like a piece of gum you blow bubbles in, and more like a piece of hard candy you let dissolve in your mouth, y'know?"

 

"You have no idea how much that means to me." Toph deadpanned. 

 

"Great! Anyway, here! It's easiest if I just show you." Pinkie finally pulled her mane out of the dirt and rolled up to a standing position--human-style standing, as she balanced on her back hooves, shuffling them to be a little more than shoulder-width apart, her front hooves ready at her waist. Toph instantly recognized the most basic Earthbending pose, the Horse Stance. Admittedly, she reflected, seeing an actual horse do it, it was a much different stance, since her knees bent the other way... regardless, Toph emulated the pony.

 

Pinkie took a single deep breath to center herself, then fell forward on the exhale, her front hooves, too, making contact with the Earth. Her breathing slowed to become almost imperceptible, and she virtually disappeared from Toph's perception: the bouncy Earth Pony, always a bundle of constant vibrations, was suddenly, perfectly, still. Toph unconsciously dropped to hands and knees, dug her own palms into the dirt, splaying her fingers to better hearfeel the Earth's voice. The motion gave her a  nostalgic memory of learning  Earthbending from the Badger-Moles, so long ago.

 

People who thought the Earth was quiet, Toph reflected, were WAY wrong. Even once you got past the obvious sounds of animals moving in their burrows, trees drinking from the soil, its voice was constant, barely perceptible but always there, like the world's slowest heartbeat. Both Earthbenders slipped into a meditative trance, their senses casting deeper, deeper, past the underground rivers, the long, slow grumbles of the tectonic plates, the ores and metals humming their notes into the chorus, the pressures mounting as they went deeper and deeper, all the way to the Sea of Flame... and beyond--Toph's brow furrowed--beyond it, at the very core... something... metal? 

 

Pinkie Pie's voice pulled Toph ten thousand _li_ back up, sounding almost dreamlike as she spoke, her eyes closed. "Ponies think I never listen, but really I do. I'm always listening--to what they're saying, to what they think I think they're saying, to what they're not saying, and the Earth..." her hoof moved across the soil in a tiny, affectionate motion.

 

"She's always with me." A serene smile echoed in her voice, and Toph felt an answering one spread across her own face: someone else got it. 

 

Toph gradually returned her awareness back to her body and felt her eyebrows raise slightly--a young lady without her extensive and all-pervading etiquette training would have gasped aloud. Far from being invisible, the pony's silhouette now fairly glowed in her hearingsight: somehow the thousands of tiny voices of the Earth's speech were going into Pinkie and  _ staying there _ , always increasing, the vibrations building and building... 

 

Toph reached up to put her hands on Pinkie's back, and the pony's slight chuckle only added to the Earth's song. She pressed her ear right to the pony's fur, and she could hear her heartbeat, breathing, the flow of her blood mixing with the voices of stones and metals, the Avatar singing in harmony with the Earth.

 

Toph listened in amazement as the voices of tiny pebbles and specks of dirt hummed along the infinite fractal curlicues of Pinkie Pie's tail, "lighting" it up as bright as anything. In fact the vibrations were magnifying, building up into some sort of resonance cascade--Pinkie's tail twitched, sending them flying out, they bounced down into her hooves--she shuffled them rapidly, and the vibration rushed up towards her head. 

 

Pinkie sneezed. 

 

"Wow, that one was a DOOZY!"

 

At this point Toph left her manners behind and let her awe fully into her voice. "What is it? What did the Earth say!? I've always been able to  _ hear _ it but, sheesh... I don't speak the LANGUAGE!" 

 

Pinkie appeared to be flipping through a mental list. "Tail twitch... hoof shuffle... nostril tickle..." 

 

Her face scrunched up in confusion. "Be Wary Of Bright Comets?" 

  
They both shrugged.


End file.
